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Siam's only effective contribution to the war in Asia was to act as a jumping-off ground for the invasion of Burma and as a base for Japanese forces operating in Malaya, Yet this small country found itself at the centre of an increasingly acrimonious debate between London and Washington. This was no briefer simple misunderstanding between allies. The. problem began in 1942 and dragged on well into 1946, Its real cause was obviously not the conduct of the Siamese9 but sharply contrasting perceptions of previous roles in Asia and of national interests in the post-war world. It was a dispute that demonstrated how difficult it was to get Anglo-American political and military collaboration in South-East Asia., as long as Britain remained an imperial power9 at the very time when the war was engendering in Europe a remarkable degree of co-operation between the two countries.

The collapse of the British Empire in south-east Asia in the early months of 1942 brought to the fore in Anglo-American relations the different attitudes of the two countries towards colonialism. Surprisingly, their long standing disagreement about the merits of colonialism was not pushed to one side by the need to defeat Japan. On the contrary, Britain's humiliating setbacks in Malaya and Burma reinforced doubts and confirmed prejudices in the United States about the probity of the British Empire – doubts and prejudices that were powerfully articulated throughout 1942 and succeeding years in the American press as well as in private exchanges between members of the Administration and their British counterparts.

The British Labour Party was not explicitly socialist until 1918. In February of that year a Special Conference adopted a new constitution which stated that the ultimate aim of the party was:-"To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service."Before this change, Ramsay MacDonald, writing in 1911, had said: "The Labour Party is not Socialist. It is a union of Socialist and trade-union bodies for immediate political work…" The new party, founded in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee, was in many ways un manage de convenance of militant Socialists and Glad-stonian Liberal trade-union leaders. The "immediate political work" for which these groups came together was the representation of the working class in parliament. Of the need for such representation both sides were firmly convinced: the Socialists because they hoped to convert the trade unions to their own way of thinking; the trade-union leaders because they were disappointed by the failure of the official Liberal party constituency caucuses to adopt more working-class candidates.